The year 1976 is correctly taken to be the bicentennial year of United States independence, which officially began on July 4, 1776. In a broader sense, however, the year 1776 was also pivotal year in the “Age of the Democratic Revolution” that swept through the entire Atlantic Community of nations during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.
This year, 1976, therefore, may also be properly considered the bicentennial of the opening year of the “age of revolutions” in the whole of America. Professor Robert R. Palmer, in his distinguished work on the subject, convincingly shows that, as he says,
All of these agitations, upheavals, intrigues, and conspiracies were part of one great movement. It was not simply a question of the “spread” or “impact” or “influence” of the French Revolution . . . But revolutionary aims and sympathies existed throughout Europe and America. They arose everywhere out of local, genuine and specific causes; or, contrariwise, they reflected conditions that were universal throughout the Western world. They were not imported from one country to another. . . . There was one big revolutionary agitation, not simply a French revolution due to purely French causes and foolishly favored by irresponsible people in other countries.